Contradictions and the Bible: Their History and Importance

From the Mailbag:

I've been reading Bart Ehrman's Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible, and I have a question.

If the contradictions in the Bible are not just limited to factual details (which can be explained by understanding the authorship and the time and the audience and the concept that historical-factual accuracy was not an ancient near Eastern priority) but actually extend to contradictions in theme and concepts of salvation, then how did these contradictory books come to be canonized together?

Did the early church have a way to make sense of these contradictions? Were they not recognized? Or was there another way to look at it that made the contradictions not important?

The short answer to your question is that the ancients didn't ask which books contributed to their sacred non-contradictory theology: they asked which books had authority over them.

I think Ehrman renders up in boldface the problem of fundamentalism: when you oversimplify the Bible and pass it on to kids that way, even its simple questions look enormous.  It's no accident that the one-time fundamentalist Ehrman spends a little time in autobiography in each of his books: he wants to save others the trouble he went through.  If you tell your kids the Bible contains no contradictions, you'd better have really good adult explanations for the contradictions that are there.

And there are significant historical and theological contradictions in the Bible, and fundamentalism has no grown-up answers for them, only strange language games, which I'll look into in this post.

The usual responses to this question are that the contradictory details are "decoration," but that's an evasion of a serious problem.  If God is "behind" scripture (in any way at all), why should the details NOT matter?  What's the reason that Elhanon kills Goliath in 2 Samuel 21:19 but David kills him in 1 Samuel 17?  Those are not just details.  Nor is the identical vocabulary in Ephesians ("We are saved by grace, through faith, and that not of works..." Eph. 2:8) and James ("You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone..."  James 3:24).

These are serious issues that aren't to be waved off: if inspiration or divine truth has any purchase on scripture, this is serious stuff.  If the simple language can't be trusted to at least be non-contradictory, then Luther was perfectly wrong when he said that "The Holy Spirit is the best of all writers."

Nor can one say cogently that "with God all things are possible, and contradictions are not necessarily contradictions for him."  Since scripture is written for humans, not for angels, that's a silly argument.  To say that "You must go up and not down, and down but not up, in order to attain righteousness," might be meaningful for God, but it has no meaning for me.

Fair disclosure number one: those of us who read the Bible more or less for a living have known this stuff for a long time.  You can resolve some paradoxes in scripture.  But you can't resolve flat-out contradictions.  Either David killed Goliath or Elhanon did.  Either you are saved by faith without works, or works are an integral part of your salvation.

But of course the cases are not all of one sort.

In the case of Goliath, you have a historical contradiction, and the problem goes only so deep as your commitment to historical fact.  If you assume that the Bible declares flatly and factually that both Elhanon and David killed Goliath, well, okay.  You have an insupperable problem, and you might as well give up the struggle.

If you're willing to bend a bit on the importance of fact (and your question indicates you are), this is less of an important question.  The story about David and Goliath serves a purpose.  The story of Elhanon and Goliath serves a different purpose.  Neither (clearly) is a purpose related to strict historical fact.  The editor / author of the Book of Samuel (1 and 2 Samuel were originally one work) surely knew he had registered a contradiction.  I have no idea what he thought about it, but my best guess is that he had two traditions, both of which were too important to him to throw away.  A story performed for him the same role as a "fact" does for us: it was a truth too significant to dismiss.  So he dismissed neither story, though they clearly contradict one another.

The theological problems are deeper.

You ask about the early church and how they reconciled these things... and I think that the answer is a little frightening.  I think they didn't mind so much about "factual discrepency" except when pressed by their opponents.  If salvation came through both faith and works, they understood fully that the existential dimension of faith was belief, and the ethical dimension of it was works, and saw no contradiction there.  And oddly, I have as much tolerance for them on that score as I do for the editor / author of Samuel.

I might have a bit less sympathy for the authors of the gospels, who seem to have tangled the facts about the Resurrection: if your argument is that history is changed, of course you must understand "history" as best your culture allows (in their case, more or less as "pointed story that reflects a collective memory").

For those who aren't clear on how important this is, keep in mind that the claim of biblical inspiration is (at least for many Christians) so sharp and absolute that any admission of error at any level is tantamount to betrayal of the whole show.  But if you say that such problems do not amount to much, I have to ask, "What do you mean then by saying that the thing is 'true'?"

So Bart Ehrman...

He challenges the simplistic notion that the Bible (and its inspiration, and its canonization) are all of a piece, all of one sort.

For those new to Ehrman, he is a "historical-critical" scholar. 

Fair disclosure number two: I'm very much persuaded by historical-critical scholarship myself.

Historical critical scholarship holds, in general, that the first obligation of any interpreter of a work is to the historical context in which it originates.  Putting that slightly differently, it asks what words and phrases meant in the actual lived, material world in which the authors and readers found themselves.

For instance, there's just no point in debating "faith versus works" in scripture if that's not really what the texts, in their historical context and their historical ranges of meaning, meant to debate.  There's no percentage in emphasizing heaven and hell out of proportion to the ancient importance of those concepts.  The historical-critical scholar asks, "Given what we know from the material culture, what are the likely meanings we can ascribe to the text?"

The historical-critical school typically favors anchoring interpretations in the fields of meaning that were accessible to the original writers and readers.  Anything else, they hold, is an interpretation generated from the needs of later times and cultures.

At the very least, such an approach tries (not always successfully) to anchor the interpretation of scripture (that is, what its "truth" consists in) in something that can be verified by the ordinary rules of knowledge.  It is knowable, and when faced by the self-serving interpretation of either tradition or the freedom from tradition, it has a backdrop against which to emphasize the outlines of the interpretive ego.

Comments

[Rachel Pridgen]

Can you expand a little more on this:

The short answer to your question is that the ancients didn't ask which books contributed to their sacred non-contradictory theology: they asked which books had authority over them.

I read your response 3 times, and got quite a bit out of it, but I'm still struggling a bit with this. I feel like I'm missing some basic piece that will cause everything to make sense. I'm just not sure that I understand declaring two books that have contradictory points to both be authoritative. In that instance, what is meant by "authority"?

[Otter]

Well, putting it bluntly, your notion of "truth" is post-Enlightenment, and that means substituting "Non-contradictory" for "authority." As late as the very late Middle Ages, "authority" was a serious and important function of "truth" (and see the gospel of Mark's first chapter for evidence of how this works itself out).

Authority meant many things, in different times and places. But in general it contained an assumption that you _generate_ truth as much as you reflect it.

And if two texts both had "authority" for you, they were both true.

And any discussion of the details followed after.

But where truth is understood to exist apart from authority, in the natural world itself, things get a little more complicated. There, two accounts of truth that contradict each other cannot be understood to both be true. Either the contradiction must be explained away or one must prevail over the other or both must be falsified by a third account of truth.